The present invention relates to the field of calendaring software, and, more particularly, to providing an ability for a meeting initiator to specify during meeting establishment when respondents are to be prompted for attendance intentions and providing a way to automatically summarize and coordinate delivery of the intention responses.
In a calendaring application, a meeting initiator generally specifies meeting recipients when a meeting is established. Each of these recipients receives an electronic message constituting an invitation, which the recipients are able to add to their personal calendar. The meeting initiator can specify an optional field that provides feedback regarding whether recipients intend to attend the meeting or not.
One problem with current systems is that the intentions are prompted for at the time the meeting invitation message is received, which is at approximately the time the meeting was established within the calendaring application. Responses regarding attendance intentions provided upon invitation receipt can be relatively inaccurate.
That is, meetings are often established as soon as details are finalized, which can be significantly advanced from a time of the meeting event. Scheduling conflicts and other changes occurring between a time invitations to a meeting are sent and the actual meeting time will cause many who originally intended to attend to no longer be able to attend. Thus, intention responses received through conventional calendaring systems are relatively inaccurate.
Another problem with current systems is that intention responses are conveyed to the meeting initiator or a designated coordinator in a series of messages (often email messages) received at approximately a time that invitees respond with their intentions. Different invitees can send their responses days or weeks apart from each other. This results in a substantial manual effort for the meeting coordinator to group, track, and tally the responses. It is extremely easy for a message coordinator to miscalculate a set of intention responses for a meeting, especially when that coordinator is responsible for multiple meetings, which results in a sometimes overwhelming barrage of intention responses received over a chaotically distributed time period.